Forty years ago last Wednesday, baseball changed. Most obviously for Philadelphia Phillies fans, baseball changed because, at last, after 97 long, ugly seasons, the Phils were finally World Series champions. But on a grander scale the game itself changed the moment Tug McGraw struck out Kansas City’s Willie Wilson at 11:29 p.m. EDT—we Phillies fans are not ones to skimp on the details when it comes to our scant moments of glory—to clinch both Game 6 and the series. At that moment, or to be more precise, immediately following that moment, something momentous in baseball history occurred: More than 65,000 delirious fans jumped up and down, hugged complete strangers, and sprayed beer into the ether—all while remaining in the stands.
Not wholly by choice, though. Until that point baseball had what was a decades-old tradition, inglorious as it may have been, of fans charging the field whenever the home club clinched either a pennant or World Series championship. Just four years earlier, Yankee Stadium instantaneously became rush hour at Penn Station when first baseman Chris Chambliss hit the pennant clincher into the right field bleachers, sending the Yanks off to meet the Reds in the 1976 World Series. Within seconds the field became a mass of bodies, as Chambliss struggled to make it around the bases before retreating to the relative safety of the Yankee locker room. (Don’t forget, sports writer Dick Young was waiting in there for him.) Forty-four years later, Chambliss still hasn’t touched home plate.
The following season, in the aftermath of the Yankees’ World Series–clinching Game 6 victory, Reggie Jackson did his best Franco Harris impression, barreling through the huddled masses of Yankee Stadium no longer yearning to breathe free. Jackson body-blocked one of the revelers straight into football season. Heck, even though the Pirates clinched their 1979 World Series championship in Baltimore, they were greeted by the several hundred fans who spilled over the Memorial Stadium fencing onto the field, looking to attach themselves—figuratively for most but literally for a few—to the triumphant team on the field. It was an odd tradition, but one that in a quirky way served to connect those in the stands with those on the field. Those players were playing for us, was the mindset, and when they won, we won too. Naturally, we should all celebrate together.
Until Oct. 21, 1980.